Trouble in the skies

Push for air traffic growth sidesteps climate concerns

Critics say the Bush administration isnt addressing the effect of increased air transportation on global warming.

PHOTO BY JOHN COSTELLO/MCT

Untitled Document
As the Bush administration moves forward with plans
to double or triple air traffic capacity by 2025, the government may be
placing concerns about aviation’s impact on climate change on
standby. Congress created the Joint Planning and Development
Office in 2003 to institute the Next Generation Air Transportation System
(NextGen), a program designed to transform America’s air traffic
control system to allow for increasing air travel. NextGen is housed within the Federal Aviation
Administration but includes representatives from the departments of
Transportation, Defense, Homeland Security, and Commerce, as well as from
NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The NextGen program boasts several new technological
reforms that promise to “significantly [increase] the capacity,
safety, efficiency, and security of air transportation operations.”
But even as the FAA maintains that climate change is a pillar for NextGen,
mixed messages about the strength of the foundation abound.Despite repeated calls from the international
community to take immediate and urgent action to mitigate climate change,
the JPDO says its hands are tied on moving quickly, citing the general
scientific consensus that uncertainties exist in linking aviation with
climate change. In stark contrast to the European Union, which has
identified aviation’s climate effects as the “most significant
adverse impact of aviation,” the United States has placed “air
quality and noise … [as] the current focus of attention,”
according to a 2004 FAA report. Although the FAA calls climate change “the most
serious long-term environmental issue,” two consecutive NextGen
progress reports to Congress in 2005 and 2006 have failed to include any
mention of climate change, much less how the overhaul of the aviation
system might lead to an increase in the greenhouse-gas emissions that
contribute to climate change. Instead, both reports only highlight noise
pollution and local air quality as key environmental issues affecting
aviation’s capacity for growth. Climate change does not make this
list, nor does the JPDO suggest that it is considering how capacity growth
will affect climate change. Even NextGen’s Web site sends a conflicting
message about its environmental priorities. Although the site says that the
program is “thinking green,” it does not refer to climate
change outright, only “fuel consumption, in its list of
“primary environmental concerns.”Rick Piltz, director of Climate Science Watch, a
watchdog group sponsored by the Government Accountability Project,
published a report in July criticizing the FAA for neglecting climate
change in the congressional reports. “If you’re doing strategic
planning and you’re reporting to Congress about the stuff
you’re doing, shouldn’t you at least be talking about how a
global-warming emissions-reduction policy would have some implications for
the future of aviation policy?” Piltz asks. Piltz says the FAA’s failure to confront
climate change is characteristic of an “anti-regulatory and
anti-preparedness” administration that is notorious for soft-pedaling
the issue.“The Bush administration has a specific way of
dealing with climate change, which is, ‘We will not regulate
emissions, we will manipulate or ignore the intelligence about the problem
and the implications in order to conform to our political message, and we
will leave us unprepared,’ ” Piltz says. “[NextGen] is
just one more example. Inside the government, Bush administration officials
are steering conversation away from the connection between aviation and
global warming, instead of putting it out on the table.”But Carl Burleson, head of the JPDO Environment
Working Group and director of the FAA Office of Environment and Energy,
criticizes Piltz’s study for being factually inaccurate. In
particular, Burleson points out that, despite Piltz’s claims that
greenhouse-gas emissions from planes have been increasing, Bureau of
Transportation statistics show that CO2 emissions from jet fuel have actually decreased by 5
percent since 2000, despite a growth in capacity. Burleson also disputes the assertion that that
NextGen’s failure to specifically mention climate change in its
recent reports means that the FAA is indifferent to the problem. He says
that the progress reports focused on issues that could immediately affect
aviation growth, such as noise pollution, but that climate change and
energy are not seen as “immediate issues in terms of constraining
capacity growth but as potentially long-term issues.”“[Climate change] is not an immediate issue on
capacity,” Burleson says. “There are certain environmental
factors that restrain the capacity of the aviation system in the United
States today, and certainly noise and local air quality are two of those
that definitely have impacts on the ability of airports to expand and
basically the relationship between communities and airports. Climate is not
in that category yet.”But even though Burleson justifies climate
change’s nonappearance as a capacity issue, a 2004 report from the
FAA to Congress discussing the environmental effects of air transportation
noted, “Immediate action is required to address the interdependent
challenges of aviation noise, local air quality and climate
impacts.”Much is still unknown about aviation’s effects
of climate change. In 2006, the FAA took a step toward unlocking some of
the mystery by co-hosting a workshop in Boston to specifically examine
climate change and aviation. A published report of the workshop stated,
“The effect of aircraft emissions on the current and projected
climate of our planet may be the most serious long-term environmental issue
facing the aviation industry.” The workshop, attended by experts and
academics, concluded that scientific uncertainties are slowing any plan to
tackle aviation’s climate impact and laid out a roadmap to conduct
further research. The call for more research was sounded again this year by
the JPDO’s Environmental Working Group plan, which reiterated the
need to “gain sufficient knowledge of climate change effects of
aviation.”Burleson says a better understanding of
aviation’s climate impact would lead to a more appropriate approach.
“We don’t want to in essence be targeting the wrong action and
creating more of an issue,” he says. Piltz agrees that more research needs to be
performed, but he lambastes the FAA as waffling under an “exaggerated
sense” that there’s “too much scientific
uncertainty” to take any action. “So all they will say is,
‘Yes, we’re talking about climate change. We acknowledge that
it’s an issue so we’ll study the uncertainties and get back to
you,’ ” Piltz says.The JPDO maintains that NextGen, while adding more
planes to the sky, will be better for the environment because it creates
more direct plane routes and a quieter, more fuel-efficient descent
approach for planes. FAA Administrator Marion Blakey has lauded
NextGen’s environmental merits, claiming during a speech in June that
“[a]t the very heart of our NextGen plan, we’re taking a
comprehensive and systematic approach to reducing [aviation’s
emissions] footprint.”But while building NextGen’s environmental
credentials Blakey and other government officials have condemned the
European Union for taking more decisive action on climate change and
aviation; The EU is considering including air carriers in a scheme to
“trade” carbon dioxide emissions, which would subject American
planes to regulation. In a May speech, Blakey said, “Trying to force
a European solution on the world, given the different aviation sectors,
economic circumstances, and environmental issues of countries, is
unworkable, not to mention illegal. In Europe, there are factions working
to curtail aviation growth regardless of the benefits we offer to the
economy and quality of life.”The airline industry has also claimed that economic
growth is at odds with environmental sustainability. According to a 2007
survey conducted by Sabre Airline Solutions, only 5 percent of North
American airlines view environmental issues as a major challenge; a
majority ranked fuel costs as a pressing concern.“As long as U.S. carriers are focused on
survival and rebuilding their balance sheets, and their regulatory climate
is not pushing hard, they will not likely embrace environmental concerns as
much as European or other regions’ carriers,” Steve
Hendrickson, a Sabre Airline Solutions senior strategist, said in a press
release. NextGen is turning to several airline carriers for
industry input on the program, as well as other corporate interests.
Burleson says that scientists are also advising the JPDO and that the EPA
is represented on the Environmental Working Group, though not on the JPDO
Board. Only a handful of environmental groups, none of which deals directly
with climate change, are included in the Environmental Working Group. “We did try to invite onto the Environmental
Working Group a number of environmental groups early on, but frankly they
weren’t terribly interested because they said they had a lot of
different things they were working on and, relatively speaking, aviation
wasn’t their focus at that point,” Burleson says. Congress is partly responsible for the lack of
environmental representation on the JPDO Board and for climate
change’s poor representation in NextGen’s progress reports. In
legislation creating the JPDO, Congress did not mandate the inclusion of
the EPA or the Department of Energy as members. There is also no mention of
climate change in the legislation, and there is only a vague order to
review “activities relating to noise, emissions, fuel consumption,
and safety conducted by Federal agencies.”The Bush administration’s ramping up of air
travel comes at a time when an increasing number of voices are calling for
consumers to curb their flying. A 2007 press release from the U.K. chapter
of Friends of the Earth says, “We need to fly less, buy less,
regulate polluters and support communities affected by pollution and
climate change.” The FAA says aircraft emissions account for 2 to 3
percent of the total U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. Piltz says he understands why there’s
resistance to reducing flying, because it’s “not going to be
comfortable to deal with.”“To say cut back on going to the airport? It
flies in the face of the whole concept of being a modern society,” he
says, “but I don’t think the way to deal with that as a
democratic society is to avoid talking about it.”Megan Tady writes about environmental issues for
Chicago-based In These Times.